


THE COLORS OF THAT PIECE OF TIME

by ivorygates



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Dark, Darkfic, Dimension Travel, M/M, Quantum Mirror, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:13:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"You simply won't  be transported <span class="u">physically</span> through the Quantum Mirror into the alternate realities.  Instead, we believe that you will experience them as if you were the Colonel Mitchell who belonged in that universe.  Your consciousness should be linked to that of the Colonel Mitchell who belongs there, utilizing him as a reference point.  It was why you were chosen for this experiment."</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	THE COLORS OF THAT PIECE OF TIME

"You sure this is going to work?"

He doesn't know why he's asking Jackson. Sam's the science, after all, the one who talks about dimensions and continuums and string theory and alternate realities and makes it all sound _reasonable._ And he loves Sam and has from the days when his ass was in the hard plastic chair and she was up on the podium laying down the law about vectors and angles and velocity and lines of force and scribbling equations on the whiteboard that he was doing his best to follow. But somehow it's Jackson he wants to hear the answers from, because he'll believe Jackson even when Jackson's telling him things that aren't strictly true.

Maybe especially even then.

And Jackson gives Cam his very best patiently-annoyed frown, looking up from the corner where he's fiddling with a pen (staying out of Sam's way and Dr. Lee's way, and out of the way of a couple of lab techs who are there to crawl around on the floor on their hands and knees plugging really damned big cables into things) and says: "It's an experiment."

_So_ not what he wanted to hear.

"You don't have to do this, you know, Cam," Sam says, walking over to him and looking serious and concerned. She reaches down to touch his hand. He stretches his fingers up toward hers. Hands and arms and wrists (hips and chest and ankles and thighs) are all strapped down to the chair, and he feels like the condemned man awaiting electrocution.

"Yeah, I do," he answers, sighing.

"Of course, it's a lot safer than actually going through," Jackson says, glancing up again from whatever he's doing in his corner. And Cam supposes Jackson would _know_ , since the man has been through this thing not once, but _twice._ "If Sam and Bill are right, the experience will be closer to the Gatekeeper's virtual reality than a trip through the Quantum Mirror."

"But it will be _real_ , right?" Cam asks doubtfully.

They've covered this in at least three briefings, and he's still not sure he gets it. He's with them all the way through finding the Quantum Mirror on P3R-233 (really cool mission report), bringing it to Earth, storing it at Area 51, having an Alternate Sam come through it a couple years later, bringing it back to the SGC, saving Alternate Sam's reality, deciding to destroy the Mirror because it was too dangerous to keep around, having the NID steal it before it could be destroyed, and recovering it a couple of months ago in an interdepartmental raid on an NID warehouse. And because they're ass-deep in Ori now, 'too dangerous' has become relative, and they're going to go on this little spelunking expedition.

"Of course it will be 'real', Colonel Mitchell," Dr. Lee says, and Cam can practically hear the air quotes in his voice. "You simply won't be transported _physically_ through the Quantum Mirror into the alternate realities. Instead, we believe that you will experience them as if you were the Colonel Mitchell who belonged in that universe. Your consciousness should be linked to that of the Colonel Mitchell who belongs there, utilizing him as a reference point. It was why you were chosen for this experiment."

"Actually, Bill, Mitchell volunteered," Jackson says helpfully.

And yeah, he did (and he wishes Dr. Lee sounded more definite about all this.) Because of the whole 'linked-brains' thing. Leaving aside the fact that this doohickey could just _fry_ whoever gets hooked up to it, and the fact that it's better to have Sam available to fix things than having her sitting in the Big Chair, in some Alternate Universe, there's the fact that Sam is as likely to be getting coffee for some jerk General in the Pentagon or teaching physics at MIT as she is to be working for the SGC, and Jackson's probably a _barista_ or a college professor somewhere, and Vala and Teal'c, well … Vala flatly refused to have anything to do with this and the big guy could be a lot of places. And none of those places (not for any of the three of them, really) is likely to yield any useful tactical intelligence on Topic A.

But there are damned few places that one Cameron Everett Mitchell is likely to be aside from God's Own Air Force or the SGC, and in either place, he's probably going to learn _something_ useful. 

"We won't actually know what's happening to you," Sam says, and Cam could really do without hearing the worried note in her voice. "Without the control device -- and I guess, all things considered, we're lucky Alternate Me took it with her -- we don't really have any way of controlling the Quantum Mirror. If everything goes according to plan, a micro-pulse of energy from our portable _naquadaah_ generator should activate it, but while our previous experiences with the Mirror have all involved--"

"Sam, Sam, Sam," he says. "Do _not_ confuse me with explanations. You turn it on. I have an out-of-body experience. When my lips start turnin' blue, you unplug me. I tell you everything I know. That about it?"

She smiles at him, looking like the project head waving hail and farewell to whoever's about to climb into the cockpit of the latest experimental bird and hoping he doesn't make a pancake out of it before they get some useful data. "Pretty much," she says.

"Then let's light 'er up."

She slips the bite-guard between his teeth -- it's something he can spit out if he needs to yell -- and buckles the headband into place. He feels trailing wires, fine as hair, brush his cheek, and somewhere back behind him something starts to beep.

"Power in three, two …one," Sam says.

There's a flash behind his eyes and everything goes white.

#

"Come _on_ , Mitchell!"

Jackson sounds especially pissy today, his voice with the whip-crack of command to it that always makes Cam want (for just an instant, until good sense and good manners assert themselves) to find some convenient wall to slam him up against for a brisk explanation of just who the _fuck_ is in command of SG-1. As always, the impulse passes, and he takes a step forward, his boot crunching down through at least eight inches of new snow.

What the--?

He was--

_"Mitchell!"_

Oh, Jesus, who set fire to Jackson's tampon? The man has exactly two moods: smug and irritated, and Cam isn't particularly fond of either. Especially when they're directed at him. (Okay, _three_ moods, if 'indifference' is a mood.)

By the time he catches up to the other three -- hustling his ass across a snowfield, flat and white and glistening in all directions beneath a sky so blue it's nearly purple, and the only thing in sight that isn't flat and white and snow is the Stargate -- he's got a headache and his stomach is churning, and it's not because (not just because) when he looks around (so damned quiet; too damned quiet) he hears a phantom radio and the hash of static, and the sounds of his boys and girls going down to death in ice and fire beneath a sky just this blue. It's because

_i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together_

he's Cameron Mitchell. And he's Cameron Mitchell. Two sets of not-quite-identical memories, overlaid, and back at the SGC they thought he'd be _observing_ , but it's more like he's remembering, while remembering (at the same time) that what he remembers isn't true at all. ( _What is Truth? said Jesting Pilate_ ; that's one of Jackson's favorite quotes.)

His father died when he was ten (his father lost both legs in a crash.)

He's got a sister named Ashley (he's got a brother named Ashton.)

"Glad you could join us, Mitchell," Jackson says. His breath smokes on the air, and Cam can't see his eyes; they're all wearing dark goggles because of the snowglare.

"Happy to be of service," he says. Only it isn't him (the one who's watching, the one who remembers the Mirror and the chair and having been somewhere else just a moment ago) it's the other one. Local boy (real, unreal, for values of 'real' involving dictionaries written by people who aren't living his life), and hearing his voice (his own voice) is like hearing a recording, or when you call one of those Talk Radio shows and hear yourself on the air but on a two-second time delay. Maybe Jackson can make some kind of pun about 'disembodied' when Cam gets back.

"We can't afford to stay very long," Sam says. "If we're lucky, we'll be able to find … something." She waves the something that probably isn't a tricorder (but he still thinks it's damned close); she calls it a 'scanning device' and Sam has _never_ appreciated a good _Star Trek_ joke in all the time he's known her. 

There's a roadhouse in Texas (no, it was Louisiana.) And he's back in the world for a flying visit, home on leave (home for Christmas) with Captain Carter tucked under his wing because it isn't right that you should get Stateside leave and not have a home to go to. He doesn't remember who started the fight in the bar, but he remembers that was the first time he slept with Sam (no, it was later, much later.) He shakes his head to clear it.

"Are you all right, Cam?" she asks.

"Fine," he answers briefly (thinking thoughts not his own, of this morning's briefing, of the reflexive clutch of dread at the pit of his stomach at the description of P87-555, snow and ice and cold, cold, _cold_.)

Sam turns away, walking across the glistening trackless snow. Jackson and Teal'c follow. Teal'c uses his staff-weapon like a walking stick, punching through the shining crust of ice on top of the snow (but Teal'c hasn't carried his staff weapon on missions since Cam convinced him to come back to SG-1; he's always carried the MP7, just like the rest of them.)

He's supposed to be prospecting for useful intelligence. They didn't tell him how to do that, but they shouldn't have to. Not because he has any kind of an Intelligence background (he doesn't) but because he's SG-1. And he's not sure how much influence he's got over his ride, but he does his best to concentrate. Crazy evil lightbulbs. Fate of the galaxy.

But it's like talking to himself in an empty room. Nothing's different. _(Jackson's blood on his knuckles; his own voice in his ears, shouting damn you, you son of a bitch, you've killed us all…)_ He looks down at his hands (mittens over gloves) and the thread of fear at being unable to remember whether that really happened or not (reality is a state of mind) is dissolved in the rising tide of panic because a different wall between two other Mitchells is crumbling, and that wall doesn't lie between dimensions, but between 'past' and 'present' and it seems to be pretty universal because there's no discontinuity for him to cling to, some Freaky Friday Let's Do The Time Warp to remind himself that it isn't here and now. There's just the cold on his face and the cold sinking into his bones and the smell of snow and he feels cold white fire in every hidden scar and healed bone…

"What's dripping?" he hears his voice say, harsh and tight. He can hear it: _pock. pock. pock._ and it isn't a broken fuel line because the 302 has a _naquadaah_ generator which is what gives it near-space capacity so _he wants to know what's dripping_.

He can feel bile burning in his throat, and the harsh metallic taste of adrenaline and panic on his tongue, and oh, Jesus, he hates the cold. He remembers praying to God and Santa when he was little to make it snow at Christmas so his front yard would look like all the Christmas cards (damned small chance of that in North Carolina) and he remembers going on skiing trips with friends and horsing around in the snow for hours. And he remembers his first winter at the SGC, his first winter North after Antarctica, and he'd come out his front door one morning and found six inches of snow on top of his fucking car and he'd turned around and gone back into his apartment and grabbed the bourbon and slammed back two fingers straight then gone into the bathroom and thrown up. He'd almost been late reporting in that day. No more skiing trips for Colonel Mitchell, and it's just God's mercy that the Ori don't like to build snow forts. O'Neill's team caught plenty of missions to icebox planets; his never has.

Until now.

_'There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.'_

And he can't even tell himself he isn't really here, because he really is, just like he was really there, and everybody who _hadn't been there_ called it the Hoth Campaign, but they hadn't been trapped in a hunk of twisted metal in the middle of a snowfield, waiting to die because some bastard fucked up and decided they were running a salvage operation instead of a rescue operation and he isn't even sure how long he was there because the sun never really set and that's probably why he survived until the bean-counters got off their fat asses and came to look for him. And the people whose lives he and his boys and girls saved that day walked off without a single backward glance, just like they're walking away from him now, and he can't move, he can't breathe, he _can't feel his legs._

_'It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.'_

The crackle and hash of static is loud in his headset, and they all try to go off-channel when they're hit, so everyone else on freq won't hear those last seconds, but sometimes it's too fast or the board's jammed or half-fried by incoming and you hear screams or sobs or half a prayer before you don't hear anything. He's Flight Leader. Command frequency. He hears all of it. He cranes around, trying to get visual on the ships through the cockpit -- because their fancy alien hardware isn't giving any of them _shit_ \-- and knows that if he can't see the mothership, he'll be blown out of the sky in another second and left to freeze to death on the ice because nobody's coming for him.

_'It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.'_

His legs are stiff with cold _(shattered, useless, they said he'd never walk again)_ and he loses his balance, pinwheeling backward into the snow. He flounders through ice-crust and new snow, unable to draw enough breath to scream _(shocked and shamed and furious and hating the cold, hating his own weakness, hating the people who left him to rot.)_

Jackson turns around quickly when he falls -- Cam sees the flash of light on black lenses, but there's something wrong with the light -- but it's Teal'c who reaches him first. He feels Teal'c's hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him into a sitting position, but his back is rigid, the muscles locked in spasm, and the base of his spine feels like somebody's pounding shoeing nails into it.

And oh God, he wants to say he's fine, he tripped, crack a joke, anything, _anything_ but the truth -- that he freaked out, lost control, dropped the leash on the terror and rage he keeps in a chokehold and buried down deep where he's not on speaking terms with it -- and Teal'c shouts _"Colonel Mitchell!"_ and he bites his lips so he doesn't answer _I'm crippled, you jackass, not deaf_ and Jackson shouts: _"Cameron!"_ and it's not 'smug' or 'pissy' or 'indifferent' in Jackson's voice just now. It's fear.

And the light shifts again (pilots know light just the way painters do and that's a sense that will never leave him) and Cam knows the darkness is outside his eyes, not in. He swats at Teal'c's hands using muscles that burn and ache with cold. "Sam-get-Sam," he croaks in a near whisper. She's the farthest away and something's wrong.

Teal'c hauls him to his feet by main force, and when he does, the reminder that his kneecaps have been _Teflon prosthetics_ for the last two years is enough to make Cam weep. The tears blur his eyes, but they're trapped behind his goggles, and he doesn't want to wipe them away right now.

And a moment ago the sky was as blue as glass and steel and space and one of Jackson's fucking artifacts, and everyone in the Mitchell family knows that broken bones make a weather prophet, but there wasn't time for a good prophecy, because this isn't anything he's ever seen on Earth. There's a wall of black heading toward them from the east, and Cam thinks _tornado_ even while he thinks that isn't possible, and it's pulling clouds across the sky toward it from everywhere, and the temperature's _rising_ but the air pressure's dropping, and now, belatedly, the wind starts to rise, and he hears crackling as the melting ice shifts, and the _tornado_ is bigger than it was a moment ago, and he does calculations in his head about size and velocity and where it's headed and the light shifts even further toward black and green and the last of the blue vanishes from the sky. Every joint in his body, every healed bone, every scar he carries throbs and flames. 

"Run," he says, the moment Sam and Jackson reach them.

The snow is heavy and wet and thick, melting as they run, leaving them floundering through water, skidding over the ice beneath, whipped by rising wind, and it's too dark for the goggles but the wind is so strong they don't dare take them off, so they're nearly blind. Blind and floundering and they aren't going to make it and there's no cover and you can't shoot a goddamned _cyclone_ and their Arctic gear is soaked through and it's got to be almost 23C out here now and the wind is ripping up big chunks of wet snowpack and hammering them with them with it like a snowball fight in Hell and he takes back every one of his childhood prayers and _they aren't going to make it_ but he can't say that, he won't say that, they aren't going to die here on some fucking podunk planet because they didn't check The Weather Channel before they dialed out.

Suddenly, just ahead of him, Jackson goes down, sprawling and sliding, his body a dark smear against the white. "Don't--" he gasps. "Go-- Leave--"

"Fuck you, Jackson!" Cam roars, skidding to his knees beside Jackson, grabbing and hauling and why isn't Jackson moving? "Go, go, go!" he shouts at Teal'c and Sam.

"You--" he says, and Jackson says: "I think I--" and Cam doesn't want to hear it because _they are out of time._

And…

He tightens his hands on the bag in his arms nervously. Paper-in-plastic, and okay, so he's not a Friend of the Earth. Screw it. Jackson isn't here to bitch him out.

He blinks. He can feel phantom ice melting on a face that was never even his to begin with. He's warm and dry and wearing his civvies. He's standing in front of an apartment door on a second-floor walkway; it's open to the air and the sun is shining and the sky is blue. The door in front of him is green-painted wood. It's hung with an ornamental garland decorated with carved wooden pineapples. Teal'c likes the symbology of Earth, and Jackson told him that pineapples mean 'welcome' and 'hospitality.'

_'This is the dimension of imagination.'_

Cam wants to run away, get back in his car, drive until there's nothing around but desert and cows and then maybe drink the three six-packs he's got in his bag. Because he's just slipped sideways again, and he'll never know what happened on 555. To him. To them. It shouldn't matter, and it does and it abruptly occurs to him that he really doesn't have much way to call this little hoe-down off in the middle. Sam was supposed to pull the plug after half an hour, but he's pretty sure he was on 555 for longer than that, and here he is. Not home yet, because his host's memories (oh, really bad choice of words there, Cam ol' buddy) assure him that he's come to welcome Teal'c to his new apartment. With General O'Neill in Homeworld and General Hammond (retired) as the new VP (no, General Hammond consults for Homeworld), they were able to get permission for T. to live off-Base again. He'd pushed really hard for that (no, Cam keeps writing memos to General Landry about it but he suspects General Landry throws them out unread.) T's been in the new place a week or so now and they've all got a free weekend. Time for a housewarming.

But … no. Teal'c still lives in the SGC. A year and a half ago, when General O'Neill was still in charge, he got permission to bust T. out of stir. And that lasted exactly long enough for the Trust to set him up as the fall guy in a murder in order to put the screws on Jackson.

He's him. He _knows_ he's him ( _'What is Truth?'_ ) Cameron Everett Mitchell, USAF. SG-1. Black Mountain, North Carolina, first, last, and always.

And he thinks of the fact that Momma died in a car crash when he was ten, on her way to catch a plane to Daddy's bedside (no, no, no, it isn't true, it isn't true, Momma's alive, still alive) and it was a sick joke on the part of the Almighty, because Daddy wasn't even that bad hurt (no, lost his legs; Aunt Soph sat him and Ash down in the kitchen with cups of grown-up coffee when Momma called from Houston and explained everything to them both, and Ash cried, but Ash was just seven, and he'd been ten and too damned big to cry) and Daddy wasn't ever right after that (no, they'd all pulled together; Mitchells always do) and he and Ash had gone to live with Aunt Soph and Uncle Josh on the farm, and they'd only seen Daddy at Christmas after that (no, no, no, Daddy came home from the hospital; they'd all had to live in Texas for a whole year while he finished his therapy and got his new legs and Cam's cousins teased him for talking funny when he came home but he's had his Momma and Daddy with him every single minute, for good times and bad…)

He's still trying to sort it all out straight in his head (is it just a nice daydream? is he losing his mind?) when the door opens in his face.

"Do you not intend to venture within, Colonel Mitchell?" Teal'c asks. He's got his 'I already know the _Tau'ri_ are all goddamned idiots and damnyankees' face on, like nothing any of them do is ever gonna surprise him if he lives to be _two_ hundred.

"Oh, I, uh, yeah, sure," he says. And Teal'c steps back, and Cam steps in, and swears to himself that he'll phone home just as soon as he leaves here to find out which of the two pasts he remembers is real. Because he doesn't know any more.

Teal'c has his place fixed up really nice. A lot nicer than Cam's apartment (tell the truth and shame the Devil) and Jackson's never really recovered from not getting to go to Atlantis, Cam thinks, because either he hasn't unpacked, or he never owned any proper furniture to begin with, at least after the last couple of times he died. All there is at Jackson's place is a bunch of bookshelves (and piles of books) and some boxes with blankets thrown over them serving as tables and what looks like the results of one determined afternoon's shopping spree at the Ikea in Denver. Sam's place looks the best of any of theirs, but it kind of looks like Martha Stewart died there -- several years ago.

Teal'c, now, looks like he's got some really frustrated nesting instincts. The place looks like Cam's cousin Megan Lee, who's a lawyer in Atlanta and didn't think that took up enough of her time so she opened an interior decorating business too, could've had a hand in it. Except Teal'c's place looks like somewhere you might be able to sit down without worrying about breaking something.

"Have you come bearing the traditional ritual token of friendship?" Teal'c asks, and Cam realizes he's still holding the bag. Literally.

"Oh, um, yeah," he says. "Beer. I brought beer. I know you don't actually drink beer, but I thought you might like to have beer. For company." He holds out the bag and Teal'c takes it. "So I brought different kinds. Sam likes light beer -- you know, the diet stuff -- and Jackson likes dark beer, so I brought you some Guinness, and me, hell, I'll drink just about anything, and I figured this way you wouldn't have to _buy_ beer, you know, if maybe it's a Jaffa thing, with, um, the alcohol and all." 

"It is not."

"But -- oh! oh! oh! -- that's not all! Wouldn't be a proper housewarming without something for the actual house, right? You just root around in there a little. Or, oh, hey--"

He's read so many of SG-1's Mission Reports that the details blur together. Went here. Went there. Did this. Had that done _to_ them, and no good Christian man or woman could have walked away alive and sane, but they did, time after time. It gives him hope (thinking of all the times Sam and Jackson and O'Neill were nothing more than passengers in their own bodies and not only lived to tell the tale but bounced right back) because right now, watching what he has to think of as his own hand go digging into that grocery sack without so much as a by-your-leave, it's conjuring up memories of months of casts and traction and lying in a hospital bed in a body that wouldn't answer to his will, because a body that moves when you don't tell it to isn't all that far from a body that _doesn't_ move when you tell it to, and being able to remind himself that this is another wacky SG-1 Science Experiment, and at the end of the day he'll get his brain poured back into the right place is actually a comfort. It gives him something to hold on to.

If it's true (please, God, let it be true and let him not be going crazy.) If (if it's true) they can get him back. Because … what if they can't? What if they shut the machine down and it just _cuts him loose?_ What if he goes bouncing from universe to universe forever?

He already knows he _can_ panic if he wants to (and who the Sam Hill ever _wants_ to panic?) but when the body he's wearing isn't cooperating it's easier to take a step back. Hold on. Hold out. _(The way he did down at the bottom of the world, out there on the ice.)_ He watches as his hand comes out of the bag clutching four DVDs.

"An indispensible addition to anybody's video library. The life and times of John McClane. He's a great American hero, man."

"Indeed," Teal'c says, and now he looks amused. "I am a great fan of these movies."

"Sure, sure," Cam says. "But these are _keepers._ You wanna _own_ 'em. 'Sides, the new one just came out on DVD." He can't remember whether they took Teal'c to see it in the theater -- or to be completely accurate, he remembers two completely-contradictory things. It played all summer (but that was the summer the Ori Plague hit Earth, and there was no chance to hit the mall with Teal'c.) It played all summer, and they took turns taking Teal'c (who saw it six times) and Vala was back on Earth that fall and Jackson took her along on Teal'c's last trip and she slipped out of the theater in the dark. There'd been cops.

"Then perhaps you will do me the honor of watching it with me, Colonel Mitchell," Teal'c says. "I shall make popcorn."

"I, um, sure," he answers, and he's not sure which 'him' is speaking.

Sam gave Teal'c a hot-air popcorn popper as a housewarming present. (It's the same model she gave him at his housewarming. Cam has had popcorn catch fire on top of a stove _exactly once_ and it was _not his fault_ but Sam has a long memory and for a scientist sometimes she has a really weak grasp of cause and effect.) While they're working on popping enough popcorn to get them through two hours of car chases and helicopter chases and van chases and eighteen-wheeler chases -- and he's melting the butter to go on top -- Cam finds out that Sam made a flying visit earlier -- she's babysitting something up at the Mountain (and yeah, this is supposed to be their weekend off, but they're shipping it to Area 51 on Monday, so if she wants to play with it, now's the time) -- and Jackson called this morning saying bork-bork-bork-emergency-other side of the galaxy-back tomorrow.

"Something I should know about?" Cam asks, puzzled.

Teal'c raises an eyebrow. "It is not that sort of an emergency. His expertise is required upon a matter of translation."

Well, sure, that makes sense. Not. "Vala?" he asks. Because usually she's all over Teal'c like white on rice, when she isn't trying to drive Jackson crazy, at least.

Teal'c actually smirks. "Vala Mal Doran has booked a relaxing spa weekend for two at the Broadmoor Hotel. With mud-packs and heated pumice-stone massages."

Cam grins, because suddenly Jackson's 'emergency' is making a lot more sense. "I bet Jackson's all broken up to be missing that."

"Indeed."

"So it's gonna be just us guys," Cam says. Although Jackson's a guy, and Sam's a guy when she wants to be. Vala never lets anybody within, oh, twenty-five square miles forget she's a girl, though. When she isn't being a _wolverine._ "Cool."

They take the big bowl of popcorn (with a whole pound of butter drizzled over the top and plenty of salt) and Cam gets one of the beers he brought and Teal'c gets a bottle of Snapple and they go settle in on the couch. Cam is in awe of the big guy's organizational abilities, because _he_ never has time to so much as pick up a quart of milk at the Stop'n'Rob, and T hasn't been out in the Free World two weeks and the whole place is tricked out nicer'n a bride's boudoir. And the couch is comfy, too; the kind of couch a man can sink into and be prepared to stay awhile.

Sitting here, he can almost relax. _(Thinks about Vala with blood on her mouth, thinks about Jackson hitting her and hitting her and hitting her until Cam snapped out of his stunned freeze and pulled him off her and told her that if she didn't want him to let Jackson back at her again she'd better find the key for those damned bracelets really damned fast.)_ Thinks about his mission (wonders if there's a mission anywhere but inside his head.) Nothing he remembers seems like new information.

"What do you think about the Ori?" he asks. It ought to make him feel good being able to ask -- useful to the mission and all -- but it's a him-him question, not a _Cam_ -him question (if he really is two different versions of Cameron Mitchell) and they told him he'd just be a passenger, an observer, and if he isn't, what else that they told him isn't true?)

"They are evil," Teal'c answers. Can't argue with that.

He'd like to ask something else -- _hey, Teal'c old buddy, what's the Jaffa Free Nation party line on bowing down to False Gods if the alternative is being blown all to hell_ \-- but it wouldn't be something he'd reasonably ask (he should _know,_ right?) And it doesn't quite matter if the Jaffa will (or won't) fight _here_ if they won't (or can't) do the same thing _there_.

If there's a there _there_. Screw it. He'll know when he gets back (if there's a back.) He watches the movie.

Sam and Jackson have had a lot of years to get used to the T-man. Cam still can't get past the conviction buried somewhere down deep inside that aliens come in two varieties: either they rip your head off and _eat you_ , or they like opera. And even though in his new job he's met a lot of aliens, and exactly none of them has fit one of those two categories (Vala being a shining example), the fact that Teal'c is a Playstation junkie who goes out of his way to see every action movie _ever_ still seems … okay, if _he_ were an alien, he just thinks it would be more logical to like really advanced stuff, is all. Not things that are … fun (he wonders if the Asgard have summer blockbusters. He bets they don't.)

And the movie runs a bit over two hours, and normally this would be his favorite thing -- beer and popcorn and the kind of mindless violence where nobody's getting hurt -- and he can even overlook the fact that the F-35B isn't going to be in use by the Jarheads for another four years and on the best day of its life it couldn't fire a single shot with the MASTER-ARM set switched to SIM.

But he's remembering things that didn't happen, couldn't happen, _shouldn't_ happen, and he's losing track of the 'I' that stands outside these memories and says they never happened (it's okay it's okay it's okay), because his body says they did. His body leans comfortably into Teal'c, sharing popcorn and whooping in anticipation of the _really good lines_ , and he can't pull away, can't steer it (any more than he could steer his bird after she took her last shot, and he thinks Banks was already dead but he doesn't _know_ ) and the things in his mind (not his mind, no, no, no) are of casual touches and backslaps and a hand on an arm lingering a half-second too long and Sweet Suffering Jesus, he's not a fucking virgin bride or a tender young first lieutenant. He knows where things like that go when everybody's on the same page. No harm, no foul, just keep it out of the CO's face, but how the hell is he supposed to know whether a bunch of Jaffa have anything remotely like the same codes or have ever even _heard_ of the down low? (Not him. Not him. Not _him._ )

But he feels Teal'c watching him as much as he's watching the movie, even though Teal'c's eyes don't waver from the screen, and the heat of Teal'c's thigh pressed up against his has a weight of intention instead of accident, and Cam can feel the rush of blood into his dick just as if it was really his. (And thinking that the way he is -- oh, God, is this his body or isn't it -- makes him want to _scream_ , want to _run_ , and he can't do either, trapped, paralyzed, as if in a nightmare.)

And he reaches for the popcorn again ( _not me!_ he screams desperately into the echoing mental silence, but there's no answer) and Teal'c closes a hand gently and deliberately around his wrist. The touch radiates heat down into his _bones._

"I believe we have watched sufficient of this movie, Cameron Mitchell."

And he doesn't know what to do, what to say (he and he are in perfect agreement there) and Teal'c's other hand comes up, comes around him, cupping the back of his head, and Cam would close his eyes if he could, but he can't. He's staring into Teal'c's. T has the darkest brown eyes you ever saw, so dark the brown is almost black unless the light is really strong, then you can see the irises are barred like a tiger's (and just when the _fuck_ did he become an expert on Teal'c's eyes anyway?) He has no idea what he looks like at this bright particular moment -- other than seven kinds of fool -- but he guesses Teal'c approves of the view, because the next thing the man does is kiss him.

The half-empty-bowl of popcorn goes sailing, since it was kind of balanced on-top-of-between them. Screw it. It's Teal'c's carpet. Cam couldn't move if he wanted to.

Teal'c lets go of his wrist and puts his hand on Cam's thigh. There's no pressure from the hand on the back of his head, but he doesn't need any encouragement to lean forward further.

And…

He crashes into a tree.

"For god's sake, Mitchell, are you coming?" Jackson demands from somewhere up ahead, and Cam thinks _Hell, yeah, just gimme another minute and I would'a been._

The air is hot and thick and stinks of sulphur and cinnamon and rotting leaves. He inhales, coughs, staggers away from the tree. His shoulder aches where he hit the trunk, and his feet slide in the mud, and he thinks of ice and an oncoming storm. _Not here. There._

Visibility is less than ten yards, but it isn't dark. Not night-dark anyway. The air is thick and misty, and bars of sunlight slanting down from above stand out through the mist like searchlights in fog, and he remembers Sam telling them this morning that good ol' P87-555 was half swamp, half jungle, and--

No. 555 is an ice planet and he doesn't know whether they died there or not and--

He was _just on Earth,_ and--

Cam whines in the back of his throat (he doesn't; he would if he could) because Sam said half an hour, she did, he knows she did, half an hour and she'd shut this down, they'd let him go, and it's already been at least three times that. He takes another cautious step in the direction of Jackson's voice. He hopes he is. He's following a trail, anyway -- deep sucking gouges in the forest floor where the leaves have been churned up, and the black mud beneath, slick and silky as cream cheese frosting, is filling in with little pools of water.

_'It is an area which we call: "The Twilight Zone."'_

"Why am I here?" he moans, and he's shocked to hear himself speaking aloud. Maybe Other Him wants to know too. Maybe there isn't any Other Him.

"We couldn't all get back to the Stargate," Jackson says, coming toward him out of the fog (not white like a decent Earth fog; pale gold like late-afternoon sunlight, with the bars of sunlight a brighter gold against it), speaking as if he's answering. "Sam and Teal'c had the best chance. Sam thinks it's the _naquadaah._ "

That's going to keep the Crazy Invisible Aliens that have been screwing with SG-1 since the moment they stepped through the Stargate away from them (please God) until the two of them can get home and have SG-3 and SG-5 pull on their _naquadaah_ panties to come and _get the two of them the fuck out of here._ Because they don't know what they want, they barely know that they're there, and Jackson does great at talking to himself and to the walls but he's been _shit_ so far at talking to their Invisible Friends. (And Cam is his own Invisible Friend and he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry or just go quietly crazy.)

"Come on," Jackson says again, turning away, and Cam says: "Why?"

Jackson stops, turning back, staring at him (Expression #37: Pained Disbelief) and only now does Cam notice that Jackson isn't wearing his glasses. Not a lot of point -- nothing to see, and the mist would just keep fogging them up (the combination of warm color and thick wet seems unnatural; even the air in a swamp isn't this wet.) But his face looks strange without them, as if he's somebody else. "Because Sam thinks they're plants, and if we can make it out of this forest, we might be able to get away from them."

Yeah, okay. Invisible telepathic plants. Personally, Cam prefers the giant carnivorous kind that sing, but nobody's asking him. He follows Jackson.

It's hard to see. The bars of light look solid, the trees look like shadows. Nothing has any really sharp outline until you're right up close -- they could go faster if they weren't having to practically grope their way along. Jackson called this a 'forest,' but it looks more like a jungle to Cam. The mist and the orange-yellow gloom pulls the color out of everything, but as his eyes grow accustomed, he can see that there are flowers everywhere. Cam's always hated flowers. There were masses and masses of them at the Funeral Parlor and the Church, there was a blanket of white roses on Ash's coffin.

(No. His brother is alive.)

His baby brother. Ashton Duquesne Mitchell, and one bright September day some goddamned drunk driver decided to take a shortcut through the school playground at sixty miles an hour and three days later they were putting Cam's five-year-old brother into the ground and everybody was telling Momma she was lucky it hadn't been both of them and all Cam has ever been able to think is: _if I'd been there Ash would still be alive._

(No. Not true not true not true not true not--)

He thinks they're doing okay -- which is to say, half the team might be dead right now and he's going _crazy_ , but hey -- until Jackson walks into a tree. And it's not like it's one of the little ones that pretends to be a sunbeam and then jumps out at you: this is one of the ones where the trunk wouldn't even fit into his _living room_ or maybe even his whole apartment. They've got a slick kind of bark, and the roots spread out wide and shallow and sloping like a freeway on-ramp; Jackson trips over those as much as anything, but then he goes head-first into the trunk and sort of folds up at the base.

Cam sees it all dimly from about ten feet behind. Uniform of the Day is green BDUs, which means it looks no-color black in this light. And this is just _déjà vu_ all over again as he thinks of 555, the other 555, the one that happened to some other Cam Mitchell, or maybe didn't happen at all, and he goes running through the mud, slipping and skidding (but there's nothing a country boy doesn't know about running through mud, and he remembers being posted to Ramstein AFB and doing his graduate work in mud, and taking his mud postdoc at Camp Rudder) (No. No wait. Camp Rudder is Ranger School. He'd wanted that so bad he could _taste_ it, but he hadn't been able to get one of the slots reserved for Other Services; he'd done Jump School at Benning, and he'd hoped…)

Not now.

He bangs down on his knees beside Jackson, and the texture of the mud -- slick and greasy -- makes his skin crawl. He wonders vaguely where his MP7 is but hell, it doesn't matter. You can't shoot fog.

"Daniel," he hears himself say. "Come on, Daniel," and he wonders when he stopped calling the man 'Jackson' ( _'My friends call me Daniel,' the memory comes, quick and sharp, him standing in Jackson's office his first day in the SGC, and it was Daniel from then on._ ) No. Yes. No.

He puts his hands on Jackson's back. The man is shuddering like he's sick, got chills, got the worst kind of fever ( _frozen down to the bone_ an arctic spidery voice whispers deep in Cam's mind, and he feels ice and glass spread over the frozen blood on his thighs, feels the vicious kiss of blowing snow coming in through his shattered cockpit.) "Come on, baby, please," Cam whispers.

"No, no, no, no, no," Jackson says, very quietly, and he'd almost sound reasonable, if he weren't trying to curl himself up into a little ball right now, and Cam thinks crossly that can't a man lose his marbles in peace without Jackson trying to turn everything into a goddamned _competition?_ "Oh. No. This isn't the time for this," Jackson says, and he sounds almost pleading.

"Talk to me," Cam urges, because talking is good. Talking's important. Talking's the lifeline that lets a man know just what the hell is going on when where everything's going is straight to Hell. "Tell me what's going on."

But all Jackson does is laugh, sounding wild and despairing and making all the sounds that Cam would really like to make himself just about now if he had a voice he could call his own. And suddenly he snakes himself around onto his back so he can clap both hands against the sides of Cam's face. "This," he says, barely able to get the words out through the laughter. _"This_ is what's going on."

And suddenly the world isn't too wet, but too dry, and Cam is staring at the desert sands of a world that doesn't exist any more. "It's so cold," he hears Jackson whisper. "How the hell do you stand the cold?"

Desert sand, and a desert bigger than any desert on Earth, and the dunes roll on for miles, but Cam shouldn't be able to see them, because he's indoors. And there's a woman there, and she's beautiful, and her hair is long and soft and black and falls in tumbled waves _(her hair is a bright harsh red, unnatural and shining)_ and she smiles and holds out her hands to him, and outside the wind whips sand across the tops of the dunes.

"They can't just leave us here," Jackson says, and there's neither fear nor anger in his voice, just quiet disbelief. _They can't just leave us here. We helped them save Earth._

It's like a dream, the seeing and not-seeing, and Cam's trying to concentrate (or someone is) to bring himself back to 555, because that's where he _is_ , and Jackson's talking about ( _Daniel's_ talking about) ice, and 555 was a hellhole of ice, but there wasn't broken glass on 555 and Cam can hear the broken pieces click and scrape against each other as he shifts.

And the eyes of the woman (black hair, red hair) flare bright gold, and there's fire _(ice)_ and fire _(ice)_ and fire, and all around him Abydos curls away in smoke and ash, carried off by the wind, just as his love, his darling, was carried off into the eternal night…

"Not… happening…" Jackson gasps, and his breath is furnace-hot against the side of Cam's neck because they're wrapped in each other's arms like lovers. And Cam wants to think about what he means, but in his mind, Momma and Daddy are being crushed to death by museum stones, and he's screaming at the unfairness of it.

"I can't go in there. Don't make me go in there," Jackson mutters now, and suddenly (across the scent of desert sand and burning, through the stink of sulphur and cinnamon) Cam catches the raw whiff of hospital disinfectant. 

_Daddy oh please Momma I don't want to go in there please don't make me go in there._ "What," he says (holding Jackson, holding Daniel, holding on), "what's happening to us?" (But it isn't happening to _him_ ; he's a passenger on this ride; it's happening to Colonel Mitchell, the poor unlucky bastard who got up this morning and ate his Wheaties and said: _'Sure, General Landry, I'll take my team on a pleasure-cruise to good ol' P87-555…'_ )

"Doors," Jackson grinds out, and oh, God, Cam shouldn't be able to follow what he's saying at all, but there's a blur in his mind _(sunlight and chalk dust and Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison was laughing at them all and The Doors of Perception was the acid-freak's Bible in the Summer of Love and -- Jack in a beat-up leather jacket and a ridiculous cap but somehow he looks happier than I've ever seen him when he forgets how we got here \-- and Jung on the connection between the conscious and the unconscious mind and Timothy Leary saying that acid was better than Jesus because it could teach you to love yourself)_ and he realizes that the Invisible Aliens are doing this. Throwing open the doors of perception between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind (and who doesn't have demons chained up that they never want to meet?) and oh, it doesn't stop there, because the Invisible Aliens have absolutely no notion of _privacy._

_i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together_

From the first time he saw him he's always thought of Jackson (courtesy visit to Cam's bedside at Wally Wonderful six weeks after the crash, and they were already dialing back the morphine, and _everything hurt_ , and all he wanted was for Jackson to _get the fuck out of there_ so someone would come and give him his shot) as somebody cool and distant who doesn't _feel_ things. He read the file after he came to the SGC, but it was just words on paper, and Jackson _(Daniel, Daniel, Daniel)_ was cautious and distantly-cordial and, despite everything, didn't seem like a man whom life had ever touched too deeply. Loyalty, yes, and book-smarts, and even some wisdom, but nothing more.

Now Cam finds out he's wrong.

Because he's walking through Daniel's nightmares, the ones Daniel lives with, and he's not sure how the man can _stand upright_ , let alone stay sane. "Hang on. Oh, baby, hang on," he whispers, clutching at Daniel's back with hands battered bloody from hammering at the lid of a sarcophagus trying to make it open. He's choking on the sheer crushing weight of _failure_ (failed Sarah, failed Sha're, failed Shifu, failed Ash.)

"Not real," he gasps, setting his teeth into Daniel's shoulder (Jackson, Jackson, Jackson.) He never failed Ash. His brother's alive.

"They aren't coming for us," Jackson whispers, and Cam doesn't know whether he's walking through Cam's personal hell (the place that part of him will never leave: _they aren't coming, rescue isn't coming_ ) or making a comment on their current situation. And Cam is standing in a living room he never saw while a man whose face he can't see now is telling him their friendship has been without foundation, and the words are simple, and they shouldn't be horrible, but the fact that they can be said, are _being_ said, is the key that opens a locked door and _he won't look behind it._

"Coming," he insists, because they always do _(they'll come back for Jackson if they won't come back for me)_ and it isn't, isn't, isn't real, no matter how loudly the other Cameron Mitchell is screaming inside his mind, because he died on the ice (over and over and over) and he kissed Master Teal'c of Chulak and _his brother is not dead._

"I can't see," Jackson gasps (Cam thinks of weeks with his head swathed in bandages and they wouldn't tell him for sure that he'd ever see again.) "A'ight. S'okay," he says, and sees himself destroying Moscow in a flash of light, and laughing, and being terrified that _only-a-dream_ would follow him back to the waking world.

Dreams, dreams, dreams … he's dreamed himself a caveman, and the Beloved, and Shy'la's prince; a happy drone in underground caves; the dictator of the world, and woken from all those dreams to be his true self again. And he's dreamed that he was Cam and Cam and Cam and maybe that was all illusion too. Maybe he's awake now. Maybe he never will be. "I just want to wake up," Cam whispers, his voice hoarse and thick, and when Jackson laughs, the sound of his voice is high and jagged.

The light is blinding.

He spits out the bite guard as soon as he remembers it's in his mouth and makes chimp-faces. Everything tastes of rubber.

"How'd it go?" Sam asks. She looks at him expectantly, and when he doesn't go to answer immediately, starts undoing the straps binding him into the chair. 

He's waiting for Other Cam to answer her, but it doesn't seem like anybody's home right now. Looks like he'll have to wing it. "Pretty much a bust," he says, testing the words carefully against the echoes in his mind, making sure they're the right ones, the ones he ought to be saying.

"You didn't go anywhere?" Sam asks. She sounds disappointed and puzzled, and Cam wonders what it will take to satisfy her, what will be _good enough_ , thinks that at least he did his best to _get her the fuck_ off 555, and if anybody asks him to go there again, well, he's just not going, that's all.

"Yeah, I went," he says briefly. He thinks about the mission. Maybe there _was_ a mission; he's not quite sure. "Ain't nobody got any more idea of what to do about the Ori than we do, baby girl."

From across the lab Jackson (Daniel? Jackson?) looks at him, frowning, then closes the laptop he's standing in front of with a click. Sam is staring at him a little funny as well, but it doesn't matter. "Well, okay then," Sam says. "Lets get you down to the Infirmary and get you all checked out."

Cam smiles brightly at her (still in the driver's seat, and he wonders why.) He's all unstrapped now, and he steps down. "Sure, sure. Don't see why. Not as if I went anywhere, is it?"

He doesn't wait for anybody's answer before he walks out of the room. And he waits, oh he waits, for the moment he'll be taken away from here too.

###

**Author's Note:**

> I am 78% sure this was originally written as a gift fic, which explains why it's fairly unlike my usual stuff, but for the life of me I can't remember any more about how it came to be. Except that it should serve as notice that I am a child of Classic Trek. Sometimes it shows. (Or: a quick romp through a bunch of Stargate episodes that don't exist, but could, and aren't you glad I wasn't their head writer?) The ice-planet with the tornado? Creeps out even _me_. Considering the ep where Teal'c gets to be in his very own video game, I'm pretty sure that if the SGC had a Feinberger like this, they would totally use it. And Cam, poor puppy, would volunteer...


End file.
